January 1, 2021
In When Justice Sleeps, Abrams takes a break from her considerable political responsibilities to craft a legal thriller featuring Avery Keene, who clerks for Supreme Court Justice Wynn and takes over the background investigation of a key case when he falls into a coma. In Hairpin Bridge, Adams's No Exit follow-up, Lena Nguyen doesn't believe that estranged twin sister Cambry committed suicide; otherwise, she likely wouldn't have called 911 16 times before her death (100,000-copy first printing). In Hummel's Lesson in Red, follow-up to the Reese's Book Club x Hello Sunshine pick Still Lives, Maggie Richter faces another artworld mystery. In Edgar-nominated, New York Times best-selling author McCreight's Friends Like These, a bachelor party in the Catskills is a cover for a staged intervention to help one of the guests, but someone ends up dead (75,000-copy first printing). Abducted from her found-religion parents' isolated Arkansas homestead and returned unharmed yet still treated as damaged, teenage Sarabeth gladly makes her exit, but in International Thriller Writer Award winner McHugh's What's Done in Darkness, she gets called back five years later to help with a copycat crime. Following Mangin's nationally best-selling Tangerine, Palace of the Drowned stars flailing British novelist Frankie Croy, who is staying in a friend's vacant Venice palazzo in 1966 while struggling to regain her early writing promise and doesn't quite trust a fan who comes her way (200,000-copy first printing). Having had a huge international best seller with The Silent Patient, Michaelides aims for another winner in his Untitled new work (one-million-copy first printing). Following the New York Times best-selling, Reese Witherspoon-optioned Something in the Water, Steadman returns with The Disappearing Act, about a British actress who realizes that she's the only witness to the disappearance of a woman she auditioned with during Hollywood's harried pilot season.
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April 5, 2021
Sarabeth Shepherd, the narrator of this moving psychological suspense novel from Thriller Award winner McHugh (The Wolf Wants In), is still struggling after being abducted five years earlier at 17 from her family’s farm in Wisteria, Ark., when she gets an out-of-the-blue plea for help from Nick Farrow, of the Missouri Highway Patrol’s missing persons unit. Even before Nick suggests that finding a 16-year-old girl might uncover information that finally cracks her own abduction, Sarabeth, who now goes by Sarah and works at an animal shelter, knows she would do anything to rescue another girl from an ordeal like hers, blindfolded and chained in a basement for a week before managing to escape. But despite Nick’s unexpectedly simpatico support, returning to her own neck of the Ozarks, where her estranged family still lives as part of a patriarchal religious sect, proves even more traumatic for Sarah than anticipated—and dangerous. As incredible as the plot’s harrowing twists may seem, any number of true crime accounts testify otherwise. Fortunately, there’s a light amid all this darkness—courageous, determined Sarah. Readers will hope to encounter her again. Agent: Sally Wofford-Girand, Union Literary.
May 15, 2021
In her fourth stand-alone (after The Wolf Wants In, 2019), McHugh delivers a harrowing rural thriller with a Southern gothic feel to it, set deep in the heart of the Ozarks. As her eighteenth birthday draws near, Sarabeth finds that instead of living her dream of community college, her fundamentalist parents are planning to force her into an arranged marriage. When she is subsequently abducted and found a week later alongside a highway in a bloodstained slip with a shorn head, her family's rejection of her provides a chance to start a new life. But it's not much of a life. Sarabeth's horrific ordeal, blindfolded in darkness and silence, has left her empty and paranoid, but she soldiers on, finding some comfort in her work with an animal rescue group. Investigator Nick Farrow asks for her help in an abduction similar to hers, and, after hesitating, she agrees. This is a redemptive and absorbing tale of one victim's courage in confronting her suffocating past. Discerning readers will recognize the truth before Sarabeth does, but it doesn't matter. There are surprising final twists to come.
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